


to the empire’s impeccable child-rearing

by the_garbage_will_do



Series: reyuxmas [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Drinking, F/M, Fighting, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, hux wore armor and survived tros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22030477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: “You knew Ben.”When Rey's own words hit her she staggers back, flushed and breathless. Hux stares at her, still as stone but for the flickering tension in his jaw.
Relationships: Armitage Hux & Rey, Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: reyuxmas [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1620592
Comments: 6
Kudos: 106
Collections: Reyuxmas 2019, The_Multishipper_Post_TROS_Happy_Place_Collection





	to the empire’s impeccable child-rearing

**Author's Note:**

> Cobbled together at the last second for Reyuxmas's Week 5 prompt, "celebrations." TRoS broke me, I don't even know anymore.

Rey storms out of the New New Republic’s headquarters— a working title, and if they can’t decide on a proper name without Leia’s guidance how can they expect to lead a galaxy— and jerks her hood down. This planet’s unfamiliar chill burns her nose and throat and dries her skin as fast as any Jakku day. She swears the snow and the wind evoked the tears in her eyes, not the flash of black she just imagined in her periphery, as if Kylo Ren might step out of an alley and dance through this world of white. Might dance towards her, his pretentious black coat swirling through the snow, just as he had on Starkiller.

“Rey!”

That’s Finn still calling for her in the distance, and it’s cold of her to ignore him. Still she strides forward, cussing when she nearly slips on ice, briskly heading straight for the closest gathering.

She crashes into a cantina.

The Resistance’s celebration commenced with Palpatine’s fall and hasn’t abated for a single second. Every cantina on the planet has been consumed by a brazen din, and Rey strives to join in the revelry. She orders one drink, then another.

All around her Resistance soldiers swap war stories and unfurl treatises on their side’s unquestionable moral superiority. She reaches out to their revelry, their grating unrelenting joy. She retreats to an empty booth and orders her drinks and tries to drown.

“I took down five hundred troopers in five shots. You owe me ten credits for that—”

“Hell yeah, that’s a new ring! I told her if we both made it outta that battle at Exegol we’d be wife and wife within the day—”

“On Exegol, he tried to bring all our ships crashing down with the Force. He was bowing and scraping and doing whatever Palpatine wanted, but then Poe Dameron slammed him with twenty laser shots and blew him right up!”

Though whispered, that particular statement blasts through the Force and stitches itself under Rey’s skin. No one cares about her and certainly not with her hood up, so she slips right up behind the conversationalist unnoticed.

“How much do you wanna bet he was crying like a baby under that mask—”

“Excuse me.”

They all turn, the quiet ice of her voice blasting through the cantina.

“Whaddya want?”

In the newfound silence she tilts her head. “Who are you talking about?”

The man has the gall to snort. “Kylo Ren. May he rest in a lot of tiny pieces!”

A cheer goes up through the cantina. They lift their drinks, and Rey nearly lifts her saber.

She settles for punching him in the nose.

In an instant the celebration collapses to civil war, forty battle-hardened Resistance rebels against one scavenger from Jakku. She restrains herself this time, confines herself to precise strikes that will neither kill nor permanently maim, and drowns herself in her own sort of revelry.  Ducking broken bottles and blaster bolts, she dances alone.

After she takes down the first ten or so the rest grow wise and scatter. Even the bartending droids disappear, leaving her alone again at the center of the wreckage, and she nearly lets out yet another sob—

“Impressive.”

She whips around and finds a figure in a pretentious black coat. She had noticed him before, another phantom tucked into a booth, alone at the edges of the celebration. His accent matches hers— Imperial to the core.

He slips back the hood of his coat to reveal red hair and those telltale battleship-gray eyes.

“What are you doing here?” she spits.

He doesn’t even blink.

“I was a Resistance spy,” he begins mildly. “After the first five assassination attempts I reached out to General Dameron—” and he nearly keeps the bitterness out of the word “General”— “and he offered a more earnest guarantee of safety than I got anywhere else…”

“I know all that,” she cuts him off. “I mean, why didn’t you run with the rest of them?”

He tips his head a few degrees to the side. “It takes more theatrics than this to scare me.”

“You knew Ben.”

When her own words hit her she staggers back, flushed and breathless. Hux stares at her, still as stone but for the flickering tension in his jaw.

“Why are  _ you _ here?” he asks. “I’d think you were needed at all times at headquarters.”

“Hardly. They waste all my time doing battle with each other.” 

His lips quirk.

“I can’t imagine this is comforting,” he offers, “but I was present at the start of the First Order. They had fewer resources and less blind zeal, but they straightened themselves out. The Resistance will too.”

“Not fast enough.”

“I’d offer to assist, but I can’t imagine any of them would listen.”

He snorts, but Rey takes a new look at him, considering.

“Why did you turn to our side?”

“You don’t already know?”

Rey narrows her eyes, and he watches, apathetic, as she raises one hand. The surface of his mind lies accessible and unprotected, the outer defenses riddled with bullet holes. Still the depths are locked under steel.

“Self-preservation,” she guesses. “Pryde and the Sith were threats. You watched your own back.”

“That’s what I told myself at the time,” he mutters before raising his voice once more. “If you want the truth, the others were irrelevant. I knew Ren, I could see he would turn, and I...wanted him to have something left to turn to. His mother, at the very least.”

He swallows, lips tightening for one instant.

“If Starkiller’s fate is anything to go by,” he adds, “my decision to assist Ren was likely what doomed him.”

“No,” she corrects too quickly. “He was doomed from the moment  _ I _ met him.”

His lips curl again, a morbid little smirk. “Let’s agree to split the guilt.”

Hand still lifted, she snags on a new thought floating wayward in his mind and frowns. “He never regretted you.”

Hux flinches. “He wouldn’t— he never was one to reflect on past actions.”

She outright scowls. “That’s not true.”

“No,” he admits after a moment, “it isn’t.”

“He regretted hurting you, but not...the rest of it.”

“And I would have accepted his apology with only a few snide remarks, if he were here to give it.”

“You seem far less snide than Ben remembered,” she remarks, dropping her hand.

“Ren brought out the best in me,” he answers, dripping irony from every word.

“And me, so I don’t know what the point is,” she confesses too easily, “without him.”

Hux shifts. Pulls his coat a little tighter.

“Ignore me if this is classified—” he waves a hand vaguely— “or otherwise unfit for my ears, but have you any future plans?”

“I made a quick visit to Tatooine.” She shrugs. “I think I’ll move back to Jakku.”

His eyebrows shoot up.

“It’s not as bad as they all say!” she says, defensive.

“Perhaps, but I’m terribly biased.”

“Because I’m from Jakku?”

“Because I fought at the Battle of Jakku.”

Confused, Rey scrunches up her forehead. “You’re not old enough for that.”

“No. I was five at the time.” He raises his drink in a toast. “To the Empire’s impeccable child-rearing.”

She bursts out laughing and summons her own drink back to her hand.

“And what are your plans?” she asks.

“Be useful. Try not to die.”

“How precise.”

“Yes. Well. I’ve rather forgotten how to want things.”

They fall into an understanding silence.

Then Hux abruptly says, “He’s not dead, you know.”

She looks to him in surprise.

“In all my career, Ren— your Ben— was the most obnoxious brat I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. Headstrong, willful, stubborn as a bantha, and utterly incapable of accepting the word ‘no.’ So no. He can’t be dead.”

“Just out in the Force somewhere?” 

“Designing his next ploy to dance on our nerves.”

Hux says it with a weary smile. It’s sardonic, set askew and yet the first sincerely pleasant expression to grace his face in the time she’s known him. It surprises her. When she lifts her drink in one more small toast, he returns the gesture.

She takes a sip, and it warms her with something oddly like hope.


End file.
